Living in dangerous times

Don Delillo poses In New York

Jean-Christian Bourcart, Getty Images

Writer Don Delillo poses January 10, 2004, in New York. Don DeLillo has published 13 novels since 1971, along with several plays and numerous stories. He is one of the most distinctive and interesting American writers of our day. He has written such hits as "Underworld," "White Nose,"...

Writer Don Delillo poses January 10, 2004, in New York. Don DeLillo has published 13 novels since 1971, along with several plays and numerous stories. He is one of the most distinctive and interesting American writers of our day. He has written such hits as "Underworld," "White Nose,"... (Jean-Christian Bourcart, Getty Images)

The prospect of interviewing Don DeLillo produces a certain anxiety. DeLillo, one of the most heralded American novelists of the past 40 years, has a reputation for being inaccessible, emotionally and otherwise. While by no means a recluse like J.D. Salinger, DeLillo, 75, gives interviews rarely, and on those occasions divulges little about his personal life. And like his famously intense, highly polished, vaguely chilly books — reviewers often describe his characters as cold — there's something about him that discourages intimacy. He is, first and last, a mystery, and seems to prefer it that way.

He's not without humor, however, as a recent phone conversation from his home in Westchester County, N.Y., in advance of his visit to Chicago on Wednesday to receive the Chicago Public Library's Carl Sandburg Literary Award, amply demonstrates. And on the subject of his craft, he can be surprisingly generous, even voluble — which is a good thing, since his work is so intriguingly constructed.

This piece first ran in Printers Row Journal, delivered to Printers Row members with the Sunday Chicago Tribune and by digital edition via email. Click here to learn about joining Printers Row.

DeLillo's best-known novels include "White Noise" (1985), winner of the National Book Award; "Libra" (1988), about the assassination of John F. Kennedy; "Mao II" (1991), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award; and "Underworld" (1997), which in 2006 the New York Times named one of the two best books of fiction by an American in the previous 25 years.

A: I'm OK, but I've been better. I'm working on a novel, working hard and doing my best to avoid distractions. Which you mustn't take as a comment on this conversation.

Q: I'll try not to. Can you tell me anything about the new book?

A: Not a word.

Q: I'm guessing you're one of those writers who don't like to talk about their work in progress because they feel it has a negative effect on the process.

A: In my experience, writing a novel tends to create its own structure, its own demands, its own language, its own ending. So for much of the period in which I'm writing, I'm waiting to understand what's going to happen next, and how and where it's going to happen.

In some cases, fairly early in the process, I do know how a book will end. But most of the time, not at all, and in this particular case, many questions are still unanswered, even though I've been working for months.

Q: You're about to receive the Chicago Public Library's Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and I gather that most previous recipients — who include Toni Morrison, John Updike, Tom Wolfe, Kurt Vonnegut andRoger Ebert — have some connection, maybe quite distant, with Sandburg. Do you?

A: One of my earliest memories as a reader — I don't know how old I was, quite young — was a poem of his, called "Fog," and I remember the first verse, "The fog comes / on little cat feet."

And that might have been my very first encounter with metaphor in a piece of literature.

Q: Of course, he's best known for his poem "Chicago," in which he calls it "the city of big shoulders." Maybe that would have occurred to you.

A: Absolutely. I also have another Chicago connection, which is Steppenwolf Theatre. They've done some of my plays, and these have been good experiences.

A: Yes, and it was quite an ambitious production. He and I worked on the adaptation together in our separate hotels, and then would convene in the morning. That was something I had never done before — working with another individual — and it was a great deal of fun, in part because it wasn't my play, so to speak.

Q: How was working with Malkovich?

A: Oh, it was a very energetic and kind of tireless experience. He had very firm ideas about theater in general, the play in particular, and the way actors ought to be doing their roles. It was very interesting to observe. Later on, Frank Galati directed my play "Valparaiso" in an extremely streamlined and quite effective manner.

Q: When I asked why you were selected for this award, I was told that you're a writer many other writers say they admire — a writer's writer.

A: That's good to hear.

Q: There are different ways you could take that.

A: Yes, I understand. But I have written books that ended up on best-seller lists, as well.

Q: I imagine writers admire your work because it contains so much cultural criticism, and also because of the quality of your prose. The reader gets the sense that you work very hard on your sentences.

A: Yes, I'm very concerned with questions of language. This is what I think of when I think of myself as a writer: I'm someone who writes sentences and paragraphs. I think of the sentence — not only what it shares but, in a sense, what it looks like. I like to match words not only in a way that convey a meaning, possibly an indirect meaning, but even at times words that have a kind of visual correspondence.

A: Well, you look at letters, you see, on a page. There are times when you might have an adjective and a noun that have letters that create a kind of abstract correspondence, just in terms of the letter shapes. I know this sounds a little strange, but it happens to be the case. I lived in Greece for a time, and there I was, a grown man learning the alphabet — the Greek alphabet — and I began to understand that the alphabet, if you look at it with fresh eyes, is actually a work of art. It's a series of abstract shapes that convey a certain feeling that you may get looking at, say, paintings at a museum. That's how it struck me. And of course there are the Greek inscriptions on monuments as well, which raise the level of artistic suggestion.

And so I began to look more carefully at what I was writing, and I began at this time to try, in first draft, to limit the work to one paragraph per page, so that I could see it more easily, when I finished writing it and was rereading and rewriting, simply to have that visual clarity.

Q: You still do that? One paragraph per page?

A: Yes, I still do. I have pages here of my novel-in-progress, and I have maybe 180 pages. But if this were typed properly, with each page filled, it would be a great deal less, because many of these pages have just 10 or 12 or 15 lines on them.

Q: I imagine when scholars examine your manuscripts, that'll take some getting used to.

A: Well, that's their problem.

Q: In an interview years ago with the New York Times, you said you were influenced by jazz, European movies and abstract expressionism. Could you give some specific examples?

A: I don't know if I could say that jazz is an influence in the usual sense, but certainly it was and is important to me, and in fact today I listen to the same jazz I listened to when I was 22 years old — guys like Ornette Coleman and Mingus and Coltrane and Miles Davis.

I began to discover European movies around 1960, which gave me the idea that movies could have the depth and range of novels. Antonioni and Godard and Truffaut, and then in the '70s came the Americans, many of whom were influenced by the Europeans: Kubrick, Altman, Coppola, Scorsese and so on. I don't know how they may have affected the way I write, but I do have a visual sense.

I want a scene, if possible, to be something that can be imagined visually. I'm not an essay-like writer, as some fiction writers are. I want to see what's happening on the page.

Q: With abstract expressionism, you're talking about Pollock and Rothko?

A: Have you seen the movie of "Cosmopolis"? What interested me — and this had nothing to do with any conversation I might have had with David Cronenberg — was that the titles begin with a Pollock drip painting, very handsomely designed, and the movie ends with a Rothko painting, likewise.

Q: What about abstract expressionism struck a chord with you?

A: It's just patterns on a canvas, beauty without a three-dimensional model. I didn't find it immediately appealing. It took me a while. But once I did, I became very enthusiastic. One of the great things about art is that I don't have to think about it. I just go to a museum and let it hit me. I wouldn't be capable of writing intelligible criticism about it.

Q: You've said similar things about your fiction. You've said, in effect, "If I could explain what I meant by it, I wouldn't have needed to write it."

A: In some instances, that's probably true. I'm not there to be self-explanatory, much less to offer lucid explanations to others.

Q: In that Times interview you said, "I don't think my books could have been written in a world before the Kennedy assassination." Do you remember the moment when you learned it had happened?

A: I was having lunch with two friends in a New York restaurant called Davy Jones' Locker, which is nautical slang for dying at sea. And of course Kennedy was a Navy man, and so there was that small, grim coincidence. After lunch, I went to cash a check, and the bank teller said something about it, and I can remember her face and the tone of her voice.

Q: How did you feel?

A: It was something totally new to me as a mature individual. I was alive during World War II, of course, but I was a little kid, and it didn't have the effect on me that it had on grownups. The Kennedy assassination happened so suddenly, and it was captured on film. And the impact of that certainly went into the writing of "Libra," but perhaps elsewhere in my work, too — the conjunction of violence and film, a gun and a camera.

When I started my first novel ("Americana," published in 1971), it was only three or four years after the assassination, and I wasn't thinking about Dallas at all — until the end of the novel, when the character rents a car to go to the airport, and he purposely drives along the motorcade route that Kennedy's limousine had followed. I found myself describing this, not knowing quite why.

Q: In most of your fiction — if not all of it, in fact — there's a sense of the world having been shaken up, changed in some profound, unsettling way.

A: Yes, I think my work is influenced by the fact that we're living in dangerous times. If I could put it in a sentence, in fact, my work is about just that: living in dangerous times.

Don DeLillo and Walter Isaacson, author of the biography "Steve Jobs," will receive Carl Sandburg Literary Awards from the Chicago Public Library and its Foundation on Wednesday. Nami Mun, author of "Miles from Nowhere," will receive the 21st Century Award, an honor recognizing Chicago-area authors.

Jon Ronson opens his latest work, "So You've Been Publicly Shamed," a meditation on trolls, Internet martyrs, frenzied media scandals, and the collective fury of crowds, with a story of himself seemingly going off the rails.

When Nelson Algren died on May 9, 1981, he was near-broke, living in a ramshackle rental home in Sag Harbor, N.Y., and all alone. But two new documentaries set to be screened in Chicago help give Algren his due.

All of Sara Gruen's novels, including her massive 2006 best-seller "Water for Elephants," feature animals -- horses, apes, the eponymous pachyderms -- and her new book, "At the Water's Edge," dangles the possibility of continuing that string in the surprising form of the Loch Ness monster.

Veronica Roth admits she was a bit starstruck the first time she met Kate Winslet, who plays sinister Erudite leader Jeanine Matthews in the film adaptations of Roth's "Divergent" trilogy. But Roth could have a similar effect on people with her young, wildly successful career.

A cross between Anna Karenina and the eponymous mad housewife, Anna Benz seems to be careening out of control. By the time we meet her, the protagonist of Jill Alexander Essbaum's elegant, erotic and ultimately tragic novel is sliding from one adulterous affair to the next.